HTTP/2: ​Web’s main protocol gets major upgrade

One of the most important standards used to deliver content over the internet is undergoing a long-awaited updated: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is about to see changes that are expected to speed up the web.

Mark Nottingham, an
Australian programmer who works closely with the Internet
Engineering Task Force, or IETF, announced in ablog
postthis week that
he’s completed documentation for HTTP/2 – an update to the
original HTTP protocol that manages requests between web browsers
and websites but has been largely untouched since the end of the
twentieth century.

Since 1999, HTTP has made it possible for ordinary web surfers to
click on a link or otherwise navigate through a website and
receive the content they want to receive. The protocol enables a
user to transmit requests over the internet that are then sent to
the applicable web server, which in turn takes the submission,
processes the request and renders it, relaying data back to the
person’s computer in the form of a website, not unlike the one
that’s hosting this article.

Nottingham says HTTP/2 won’t replace the traditional web standard
as the world has learned to love, but it is expected to help
sites load faster and more securely once it’s adopted a wide
scale.

“Making HTTP/2 succeed means that it has to work with the
existing web. So, this effort is about getting the HTTP we know
on the wire in a better way, not changing what the protocol
means,” he wrote in a blog post last month.

According to Nottingham, HTTP/2 will process requests made to web
servers in a single instance, speeding up how quickly content is
delivered.

“HTTP/2 uses multiplexing to allow many messages to be
interleaved together on a connection at the same time, so that
one large response (or one that takes a long time for the server
to think about) doesn’t block others,” he said.

The protocol will still use the same APIs relied on by its
predecessor, however, ensuring that servers won’t discriminate
depending on what type of requests are sent through browsers. And
because requests will be processed faster, Nottingham said HTTP/2
“reduces the impact on how fast your site seems” thus
making easier for content to be encrypted between a user and
server.

Nottingham wrote on Wednesday this week that his specifications
have been submitted to an editor and are expected to be published
soon, then hopefully implemented in the next wave of browser
upgrades. So far, Google and Mozilla have already announced plans
to make their own browsers – Chrome and Firefox, respectively –
HTTP/2 compliant.